I have been following the release of Windows Thin PC that RTM’d on July 1st, and decided to see how it worked on Hyper-V. If you are not familiar with Windows Thin PC, it is a version of Windows Embedded that is targeted toward using your older PCs and giving them new life as “Thin Clients” within your environment for connections to your Remote Desktop, Citrix or VDI environments. It is similar to the Wyse PC Extender that utilizes a Linux (SUSE) kernel. For more information on Windows Thin PC and all the details you can go here.

In the description Microsoft notes that it has the capability of connecting to VDI sessions, but I wanted to see if this would be a good stripped down platform for platform for an actual VDI for Kiosk type scenarios. According to this document, it isn’t officially supported in a virtual environment, but one thing jumped out at me in the testing that made it seem like the developers were at least thinking in this direction. It has Dynamic Memory support.

Can I run WinTPC in a virtual machine? ”WinTPC has been designed to help customers repurpose existing PCs as thin clients. Since thin client OS’s are not designed for or supported in a virtual machine (VM), WinTPC is not supported in a VM.”

Windows 7 Professional does not have Dynamic Memory Support. Windows Enterprise/Ultimate does. Now Windows Thin PC does as well. See screen prints below. More to come as I dig more into it.